"Earlier this year, Overstock became the first major online retailer to accept payments in bitcoin,
with Byrne painting the digital currency as a way of freeing our
economy from big banks and big government. “We want a money that some
government mandarin can’t just whisk into existence with a pen stroke,”
he said, in his typically colorful way. Then, in the wake of this
announcement, he advocated
using the software that underpins bitcoin to rebuild the stock market
as well. An avowed libertarian with a PhD in philosophy, Byrne has long
complained about investors using various loopholes in the financial
markets to improperly boost profits at the expense of public companies
and the overall economy—with Overstock even going so far as to sue some
of the biggest names on Wall Street—and he believes that a new system
based on the mathematics of bitcoin can eliminate these holes."